The Fear of Being Judged

The Fear of Being Judged As I was reading Shelia Bender’s, “The Art of the Personal Essay: How to Turn a Nagging Question or a Troubling Experience into Entertaining and Insightful Writing”, I could not help but think that some of the fears Bender mentioned applied to instances and experiences that happened in my life as well. One of the many fears mentioned that personal-essay writers face, stood out especially to me. This fear was to “affirm that hunger for self-knowledge drives them to write despite their fears and is more important than what others think of them”.
We all know that everyone has a problem with caring about what other people think of them, even if some would like to disagree, proving that, indeed, they do care because by disagreeing, they are trying to sound confident of themselves so that others will see them as a sturdy and unwavering person and that nothing anyone can say or do will bring them down. But this particular fear does not necessarily have to be about having a strong enough hunger for self-knowledge so that you can write an essay. It can apply to life in general as well, such as standing up for something that you strongly believe in whether or not others agree with you and to not let anyone or anything make you back down. As all of this was running through my head, I remembered a time when standing up for what I believed in was difficult because I was afraid of what others thought of me.
One afternoon at school, as I was quietly sitting at a desk in the third row to the right in my Government class, waiting impatiently for the bell to ring, I started to overhear a conversation that was getting louder and louder coming from a group of rowdy boys that were sitting near me. They were all talking about drinking and getting drunk at an “off the hook” party they went to the other night. As their conversation progressed and more people joined in, they started talking about how the age to drink legally should be changed from